


gather your peace like fine, woven threads

by kwritten



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, Female Friendship, Female-Centric, Femslash, Infidelity, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-13
Updated: 2015-03-13
Packaged: 2018-03-17 15:55:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3535310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>prompt: the comfort of spending valentine's day alone (there's no romantic way of mourning dead men and lost love)<br/>setting: Hogwarts in the year just after the war</p><p> </p><p>
  <i>The history books will say that they were born in a time of peace.<br/>That they grew into war. </i>
</p><p>
  <i>History books are full of holes.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>They were born with war beating in their blood like a promise of destruction whether the world gave it to them or not.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	gather your peace like fine, woven threads

They call it the _lost year_.

Some of them move on, there are empty chairs everywhere. Some of them mark death. 

Others mark a disinclination to play nice anymore.  
A need for space to mourn. 

Eighth years are generally forgiven by parents and siblings and the administration alike. 

There are less first years than in any other moment in the history of Hogwarts. Parents are holding onto their young. 

The ones who should leave stay behind. It’s a beautiful balance – or it could be if it wasn’t so heartbreaking, so real, so unspeakably understood. To each generation there is a waiting game. To which one do you belong?

McGonagall’s opening speech is kind and compassionate, it holds the names of the dead lingering in every breath she takes, it’s hopeful without being forgetful. They applaud. 

Cho catches sight of her in that moment, when everyone stands to celebrate the mark of a new year, her red hair is a beat behind the group around her. It almost looks as though the dark boy beside her lifted her with his hands on her elbow. 

As if she cannot stand without his support. 

She snorts into her cocoa while the rest of her house chatters and breaks into relieved smiles. 

The dust is gone and the blood stains have long since been scrubbed away, and their childish hearts are leaping already as if they hadn’t spent the last three years in fear. As if hearts could just bounce back, begin leaping again like old times. Hers didn’t. And there was nothing wrong with her heart. 

It learned to ache instead of dance. 

Maybe that was all she was good for from the beginning. 

 

The year goes by slowly – or too fast, in a blur, the details are hard to pick out – it’s strange having Hermione, Ron, and Harry sitting with her in her classes. Harry’s feather quill tickling her forearm, Hermione’s wand tapping her on the shoulder, Ron’s voice a constant low murmur in her ear. 

They were always three and she had always been so jealous of that, wanted that understanding and that constant _touch_ that they didn’t even seem to be aware of doing. Only when they made room for her, they didn’t make room for her, they just added a number to an equation that was maybe always meant for three instead of four and the result was just… suffocating. Their arms, their legs, their hearts, beating around and crashing into each other all the time.

How did they learn to breathe? 

(Could they without each other?)

She couldn’t explain the lack – she was getting all of them, she was – they were wrapping her up in their Golden selves, yet… They couldn’t live without each other. It was in every whispered word, every shoulder-to-shoulder silence. 

But they could live without her.

He could. 

That wasn’t the part that hurt. That tugged at her heart. That made her feel simultaneously like screaming and crying and made her keep so silent. 

She could live without them.

(Maybe she preferred it that way.)

 

 

Most of her friends opted to join the workforce rather than come back to Hogwarts. The Muggle-borns went to University, which was unusual in times of peace but expected in the aftermath of war. A group of Ravenclaws went to South America for an extended holiday and sent postcards once in a while. Those who didn’t come back, most of them anyway, were picking up the pieces of broken homes and broken families. Grown up too soon. The ones who could ignore it and leave, did. 

The ones who didn’t know what else to do but keep on moving, did. 

The _lost year_ at Hogwarts – they seemed to clump together. Bonded by age and war and loss in a way that wasn’t any different than any other year … there was just so few of them. House boundaries seemed to mean far less to them. (Far more to the first years than ever before.) (As if this war was merely a memory to those born into it.) (As if children learn nothing from the fallen soldier’s blood they walk over in their hallowed playgrounds.)

Clumps of a generation. Scattered about the school. 

 

Cho was in none of them. 

 

Probably there were other solitary souls out there, other lost souls still clinging to their _lost year_ and unable to move forward in one of the pre-determined clumps of nostalgia that bumbled through the school hallways drunk on sadness or fire-whiskey. 

 

The only one Cho saw was Ginny Weasley. 

 

They became a clump of their own, sitting on opposite sides of the long table in the _Dragons, Beasts_ section of the library. Interrupted only sometimes by a fourth or fifth year Ravenclaw asking Cho for tutoring assistance or one of the Golden Trio looking for their pet. 

That’s what Ginny is to them, Cho can see it in their eyes. 

Mostly she can see it in _her_ eyes. Shielded so often now by the fashionable fringe cutting a stark shadow of red over her pale face. Eyes that peek out at the world only often enough to keep on seeing, but seemingly without any other consequence. 

Eyes should yearn, should burn, should beg, should defy, should tease, should accuse. Cho has seen all of those things in Ginny’s eyes over the years and now they are hollow. 

Maybe that’s what happens when the one you love doesn’t die forever. 

She wouldn’t know.  
She’s only loved the one time.  
She has no comparison. 

 

At Christmas, Ginny stays behind in the dark halls of Hogwarts. Most of them stay. As if the novelty of being there and being safe is too precious to give up so quickly. (As if the heartbreak here was worn-in like a comfortable knitted sweater and they all knew empty seats at dinner and empty beds at night were too sharp to bear.) She hears McGonagall crying in her office and leaves that for someone else to deal with. 

She’s done playing hero. 

 

The Christmas Eve feast is stifling and hot and crowded and there’s too much laughter, too much happiness. It weighs on her heart until she feels blackened out. 

She’s in the library before she knows that she left. 

She’s not alone and that’s not so unusual. 

They don’t say anything. They don’t offer comfort. There’s nothing to say and neither one has anything to offer. 

But for once, Cho feels like she’s finally looking into eyes that see.  
Her.  
Only her. 

Sitting on a wooden bench with her legs curled up to her chest trying desperately to cry or to scream or to fucking feel but nothing comes except those eyes. 

 

 

After the new year, they sit in the middle of their table in the _Dragons, Beasts_ section of the library. Ginny with her back to _Horntail, Dragons_ and Cho with her back to _Serpents, Dragons_. Their pile of books becomes a shared enterprise and there’s something so damn comforting in that the first time it happens Cho falls asleep with tears clinging to her lashes. Ginny learns that Cho is attempting to become an Animagus and is working privately with McGonagall, but hasn’t been able to decide on an animal yet. (What Ginny learns later is that her patronus keeps changing form which is preventing her from moving forward.) Cho learns that Ginny has started a research project on Muggle fairy tales that Hermione is gleefully supportive of. (What Cho already knows and Ginny never bothers to explain is that it’s ninety-percent just an excuse to be alone in the library most evenings.) 

And that’s comfort. 

Sitting next to someone in silence for days and days on end and never needing to look up because you know they are there. 

Maybe that’s what those little clumps of lost souls are doing out there, roaming the halls and laughing too hard and sounding out words in the shape of cliché’s like they are brand new, maybe they are just getting a little comfort. 

And maybe theirs is sitting in silence with a shared pile of books and adding notes in their separate, scrolling script, until Ginny knows more about the Animagus Theories of the 17th Century than anyone else in her year and Cho knows more about the different forms of _Cinderella_ than probably most Muggles do. Maybe that’s peace. 

 

 

_Peace is a fairytale._

It’s scrawled in shiny purple ink on the table in the space between them. Small enough so that Madam Pince doesn’t notice it, but obviously of a magical nature as the House Elves seem to not have been able to clean it off. 

Or maybe they agree. 

The sight of it, comforting in its lack of illusion, is probably the thing that breaks her, leads her crawling back into war. 

 

 

The House Elves bring them coffee with pumpkin foam. The first time, they brought cocoa and Ginny laughed. She prefers her coffee dark and thick and a little exotic – has her own beans spirited to her by George presumably or maybe Charlie. Cho likes her coffee creamy and sweet. 

Ginny drinks their pumpkin coffee without complaint. 

There is sometimes also a plate of cookies or warm bread with cheese or a slice of pie. Which they share, lips lingering on the prongs of a fork passed between cool hands as they read and write and lose themselves in their projects. 

Some nights, Cho is alone late into the evening, Ginny showing up sweaty and a little muddy from Quidditch practice. She saves her an extra cookie on those nights. Knows them intimately. 

Knows the scent of Ginny’s sweat on the back of her neck as if it were her own. 

 

 

The House Elves bring them coffee and Cho was fast asleep on her books, her sleeve dangerously close to knocking over her inkwell. She woke up to Ginny slipping her wool-covered foot onto her lap. Or maybe it was there a long time, but a tap-tapping of toes against her ribcage wakes her. 

Ginny was lost in her reading. Her hair pulled back into a sloppy bun, that ridiculous sideways fringe clipped back with a bobby-pin that is threatening to fall, her feet crossed on Cho’s lap, tap-tap-tapping a beat, an empty cup in one hand, a full plate of pie between them. 

Cho looked up and didn’t smile – smiling is for little girls who still believe that nothing can harm the innocence and grace of a unicorn, are there any girls like that left in the world, probably more than she thinks there should be – and murmured a Charm to hold up that damn bobby pin. 

She hates that fringe. 

Hates the idea of Ginny hiding her eyes away.  
So they are hollow, at least they are true. 

“I saved you some pie.”

Cho wrinkled her nose and grabbed the fork, “You didn’t even have a bite.”

Ginny shrugged and waved her wand over the mug holding Cho’s coffee. It started to steam immediately. 

They ate in silence, passing the fork back and forth, Ginny’s feet tapping against Cho’s ribcage. 

 

 

_What do you really expect of girls that have only ever known how to fight because their whole world was a battleground?_

Ginny almost said it aloud when her heart leaps up in her chest at the feeling of Cho’s soft lips and tongue caressing her finger. There was a dollop of cream left behind on the plate between them and she swiped it up with her finger without a thought, offered it to the girl sitting across from her without any sense of recklessness, without any sense that it could possibly be wrong. What could be wrong about wanting to dip a small part of her cold, broken shell into the promising warmth sitting in front of her night after night? 

They act like its normal – a bit of cream fed with a finger, legs in laps, and hearts in each other’s eyes. 

They act like there is nothing wrong and there isn’t. 

 

 

Harry doesn’t notice Valentine’s Day and she doesn’t remind him. 

Even when Ron and Hermione are quite frankly _disgusting_ in the common room and at breakfast and lunch and Ginny excuses herself from dinner but she’s pretty sure that whatever transpired there was revolting. 

Harry might not have a piece of a Dark Lord inside of him anymore, but he’s still an oblivious dork.  
Which used to be why she loved him.  
Not that she doesn’t still. 

Ginny might not have a piece of a Dark Lord inside of her anymore, but she’s still beating blood black as the night.  
Which isn’t at all why he loves her.  
Not that he knows. 

She goes to the library and hopes there is coffee and hopes there is cheese and bread because that’s her favorite and hopes there is a girl there with dark eyes and dark hair and thin, soft lips. 

When it’s all there just the way she wanted, she doesn’t think about the things she’s supposed to want or the way she’s supposed to behave. 

She sits on the wrong side of the table. 

 

Harry doesn’t remember Valentine’s Day and she doesn’t remind him. 

Which pleases her in ways that she can’t quite put her finger on. She should want her friends to be happy, should be able to share in their joy, should find hope in their fingers twirled around each other’s. 

When she closes her eyes at night she doesn’t see Cedric’s sideways smile or hear Harry’s soft, encouraging voice, she feels a small, thin finger tracing the seam of her lips and a flash of golden red. 

The House Elves bring her sticky sweet red wine and soft, delicate cheese with warm bread and there is an echo in the library that beats against her skull. She can’t even tell them that the extra glass they put on the table won’t be used. It’s too cruel. 

She doesn’t hear Ginny approach, doesn’t sense it, one minute she is alone with her books and her words are swimming circles in front of her unseeing eyes and the next moment there are lips on her neck. 

 

 

The history books will say that they were born in a time of peace.  
That they grew into war. 

History books are full of holes. 

They were born with war beating in their blood like a promise of destruction whether the world gave it to them or not. 

 

 

Ginny’s skin is rough beneath her fingertips; Cho’s hair is coarse and thick. Their lips are cold and their tongues are warm, their teeth are too sharp and their blood sings of metal. 

They sit side by side, wine glasses in their hands and cheese passed from fingers to lips like an offering to a god they no longer have the weakness necessary to believe in. What good are your gods here, in the silence of their ever-present lives ticking slowly by, as their skin tells them all the things their words no longer can say. 

 

 _What do you want from me?_ Cho whispers in her ear, nipping and licking as her words hiss pass through lips that are too focused on other pleasures to stop them. 

There is a moment of silence and terror nearly seizes her, shuts her down. She grabs a hold of it, rakes her fingers through Ginny’s hair, rides her terror like an old friend. 

And then like that Ginny is in her lap, hands on her shoulders, her knees resting easy beside Cho’s hips, _Everything. Nothing._ She raises her thumb to trace the line of Cho’s lips. _Someone to not tell me to stop being sad._

Her tone is melancholy and angry and impatient. 

Cho’s fingers dance under the edge of Ginny’s sweater, meeting unyielding flesh they have been starving for, and a tear trickles down her cheek.

Ginny watches the tear fall, cocking her head to the side as if in utter wonderment, as if she’s never seen a tear before. Cho pushes her palms under her thick sweater and strokes that lean back as if it belonged to her. As if anything belonged to her. 

As if she had a right at all to own something. 

As if a person could be owned. 

_What do you want?_ Ginny whispers. She’s trying to be delicate, she’s forcing herself to be soft, and it breaks something deep down in Cho’s being. This girl who is so hard and so strong and so _much_.

 _Someone who won’t hide from me,_ her tone is harsh – much more gruff than she even knew it could be. Not harsh with sadness or with anger, but with _want_. She flicks her eyes and a bobby pin pulls back the hair from Ginny’s face. _I hate that fucking fringe._

Ginny laughs into her mouth as they kiss for the first time. 

Smiling, laughing, scratching, desperate carnivores; lusting after spilled blood – even if it is their own. 

 

Or maybe they didn’t say anything at all, speaking only with harsh breath on each other’s skin and fingers, hands, teeth grasping and asking all their questions for them.

 

Or maybe Ginny sits on her side of the table and slips her feet up onto Cho’s lap and they drink their wine in silence and in an hour or so Harry comes to find her with confusion written all over his face and an apology on his lips that she accepts with a shrug and a wave goodbye to her silent friend. 

 

Or maybe they never moved to the center of the table and they never shared coffee and pie and they never felt each other’s skin between their fingertips. 

 

 

There are moments, sitting in the library with Ginny’s feet in her lap and the taste of Ginny in her mouth, that she thinks maybe this is the part that is a dream. This part that feels like fangs and claws and tastes like battle but might be the most peaceful silence she has ever known.


End file.
